Introduction: carnivals, festivals, and pan-Africanism

Abstract

In any culture, festive events are often far more than simple opportunities to feast and celebrate. They can also be focal points for political or cultural movements, a chance to speak and act in ways that may be forbidden or limited in non-festive times. In the Caribbean, with its particular history of slavery and cross-cultural encounter, festivities were often highly policed, explosive points in the calendar. Slave dances were breaks in the repetitive routine of the plantation, and chances to breach temporarily the strict colonial authority, in which the threat of retributive violence was ever fused with the equally strong need to escape the rigours of every-day life through festive activities.